an evening of world premieres
Saturday April 26, 2025 - 7:30pm
St James Cathedral
65 E Huron St | Chicago
PROGRAM
The 2024-2025 Season is sponsored by the Katherine L. Griem and Anthony G. Montag Charitable Fund in memory of Anthony Montag.
The Woodwind Section is sponsored by Zana Tran & Aaron Silberstein.
The Pre-Concert Talk, before the downbeat, is sponsored by Andrew Lyon and the National Contemporary Orchestra.
1.
sic rerum summa novatur semper (*World Premiere)
I have long been fascinated by Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a first-century BC poem, which beautifully describes his belief that everything in the universe is composed of a finite number of small, indestructible components called atoms that move through a void. When I set out to write sic rerum summa novatur semper (thus the sum of things is always renewed), I was interested in exploring sparseness and pointillism in ways that would be new to my music. Early in the writing process, this interest reminded me of Lucretius’s atoms, leading me to rediscover a passage from Book II of De rerum natura which became a major source of inspiration for my piece:
“For Matter is not bound by fixed links; We see all things decay, and, as it were, Float down the stream of time; to all, in turn, Old age creeps on with visible advance; Decay of some leaves others free to grow, And thus the sum of things rests unimpaired; While these wax old, those flourish in their prime, But rest not there, but glide adown the tide. Thus the Great Whole is ceaselessly renewed, For mortals live by mutual interchange. — Some wax, some wane; thus generations change, And, like to runners in the Grecian game, Bear for brief time, and then to others pass, The lamp of life their hands are forced to yield.”
-From De Rerum Natura, Book II, translation by Charles Frederick Johnson
The piece begins with a dense simultaneity of active textural layers. Gradually, these layers stretch outwards, as if we are zooming in to the material, until the individual building blocks of these layers are revealed. In the second half of the piece, new harmonic material emerges and occasionally takes up fragments of material from the earlier textures.
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2.
Student Composers from Chicago Arts and Music Project
Drawn Together: Chicago Arts and Music Project (*World Premieres)
Thanks to funding from the Illinois Arts Council Creative Catalyst Grant we will feature world premieres by student composers from Chicago Arts and Music Project! In February, Executive Director Lesley Swanson, Artistic Director Jonathan Hannau and a group of our wonderful musicians led a composition workshop, helping students develop their own graphic scores!
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3.
Water Realms (*World Premiere)
Water Realms continues my exploration of natural phenomena through sonic behaviors, depicting water in its various states and the transitions between them. From heavy, unpredictable flows to frozen stillness, from melting and dripping to bubbling, the piece captures water’s constantly changing nature.
The inspiration for this work arose, in part, as a quiet rebellion against the recent prevalent trends in contemporary music that overemphasize percussive, dry, and high-pitched sounds. While I deeply love many such pieces, I also wanted to embrace a fuller, more resonant sound—one that leans into traditional playing techniques without hesitation, allowing the music to breathe and expand in its depth.
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4.
Sonder & Ozurie (*World Premiere)
ABOUT THE PIECE (on "SONDER")
Within the first month of writing this work, or rather, thinking about what I'd write, I stumbled across a word circulating social media that caught my attention.
The word was "sonder" (pronounced "sahn-der") and its definition read "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own."
Wow, I thought.
The word resonated deeply with me because I now had a word for something I've thought of, felt, and even written about on occasion in the past—this idea that everyone is the "main character" of their own life story, and we're all just filler or extra characters in the background of others'.
I never knew this feeling had a name.
A beautiful one at that.
That simple yet profound word, '"sonder", sparked not just curiosity but a sonic adventure.
In other languages, I've seen words like this before, words that describe things or feelings and emotions that we don't have names for in English, which only makes one question why we never put a name to them in the first place when they're such a collective, shared part of the human experience. I assumed "sonder" was one of those words, and, rushing to find its origin, my search led me to a book entitled The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig (what a captivating title).
Koenig describes the dictionary as "a compendium of new words for emotions. Its mission is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life".
Koenig wanted to show that we aren't alone in our feelings/emotions, and he acknowledges how our language is limited in its ability to describe how we see the world, which can leave our conversations feeling hollow.
I am baffled by Koenig's ability to articulate these emotions; The "dictionary" reads like poetry, with prose so eloquent it echoes in the soul. Each word and its meaning seems to light up a pathway in my own labyrinth of thoughts, revealing feelings I've held gently in the back of my mind, tucked away without a name.
I can't get past a page without setting the book down, shaking my head in deep thought, and thinking,
Wow, I've felt this before.
Someone gets me.
—————
But there's more to the definition of "sonder" than the one sentence on the previous page. In fact, "sonder" is one of the words in the book that Koenig used a page to define rather than a few sentences. While I won't put that full definition here, there is a more succinct, beautifully written version found on the back of the book that influenced how I approached the music:
"sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passage-ways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know exist, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk."
This "realization" Koenig talks about manifests in the opening measures of the piece, introducing a rhythmic pulsing motif one will hear throughout.
I always start my compositions improvising at the piano, and as I reflected on the word and played, this motif was the first idea I thought of that I knew would be in the piece. It's open, pensive, and gentle. It presents itself at the beginning (growing into a climactic introduction); middle; and end as a recapitulation of the piece—although bigger, longer, and more grand—fading away in a pastorale-like coda.
But there were other ideas that came into the fold—ideas more active, agitated, spiraling, cascading, and unraveling like the passages at rehearsal letters "C" and "K". These passages, which I would later call FIGURES, began to symbolize those "elaborate passage-ways" Koenig refers to, the ones that lead "to thousands of other lives" like an anthill "sprawling deep underground".
You can see how one might dive into the rabbit hole contemplating the "vivid complexity" of others' lives, and it's this rummaging and ruminating in our heads that is symbolic of these FIGURE sections.
It's about our obliviousness to how interconnected we are, or rather how our newfound awareness of "sonder" only amplifies the idea that we are but a speck, with little access to a vast world full of worlds we will never fully experience because we can only see it through our viewpoint or story.
At that moment, I realized I had everything—the material, concepts, and structure for my piece.
But then I kept reading...
ABOUT THE PIECE (on "OZURIE")
Each page was a goldmine for musical ideas—future pieces I'd love to write—but one word in particular struck me: Ozurie (pronounced "oz-you-ree" or "ozh-uh-ree" like "Oz" as in The Wizard of Oz).
The only way Koenig could fully define this word was with three pages. In short, "ozurie" means "feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have."
As someone who is constantly thinking of my dreams and ideal future, when I came across this word in the book, it hit hard. And to encapsulate all this word is, Koenig uses the story of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as an analogy:
The "orphan girl of Kansas" returns at the end of the movie, sitting up in her bed whispering to herself, "there's no place like home," but she'll eventually get out of bed to return to an ordinary life filled with chores to do on the farm. "And when she opens the door, she'll step out into a world of black and white, into a a broad sweep of flat land that reaches the edge of the sky in all directions. And she'll know that she's not in Oz anymore."
And so Koenig writes on,
"...even as she makes her way to school the next morning, she now carries with her a certain unshakable awareness—that her gray gingham dress is secretly blue, that her charcoal hair is actually a rich auburn, that the sky catches fire when the sun goes down."
He explains how Oz will now feel like a dream (and a sickness even), bringing about frustration and dissatisfaction with a normal life that now feels intolerable to her, until she begs to go back. Koenig asks,
"How long before she's clicking her heels on the sidewalks of the Emerald City, trying to flag down a hot air balloon to take her back to the comfort and safety of home?"
Facing an internal battle, Dorothy is left with a decision to make:
"Eventually you have to decide what to do with this desire. Do you tamp it down in yourself, or do you chase it?"
Kansas or Oz? And it's the inability to decide that keeps one stuck in this tension. The last line Koening writes however is what really gets me: "Spare a thought for poor Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, who dreams in color but lives in black and white."
How often do we hold onto this ideal future for our lives while simultaneously not doing anything to chase it? No change in our behavior, habits, or thoughts. No commitment. We want more yet we're comfortable, forever stuck in between Kansas and Oz...
————
And then I looked more closely at some of the musical material I came up with for "sonder." This particular passage didn't quite work, or rather it did, even though it seemed quite contrasting from my FIGURE sections. I just wanted to figure it out. Make sense of it. And after reading about "ozurie", I now knew the core theme of the piece (both figuratively and musically). The musical contrasts in "sonder" now made sense post-"ozurie".
I'm talking about places like rehearsal letter "F" (which is the direct music I'm referring to but also referring to all sections that I would later call "PULSES"), where the music is a longer, slow-burn that pulses and builds. And while the whole has a strong pulse, including the initial rhythmic pulsing motif I mentioned earlier, but this is different: It starts intimate and becomes overwhelming, symbolizing this internal battle reaching the point where everything boils over (before we're back at square one). It's this idea of getting "fed-up" with our inability to decide, but there's a sense of beauty and mournfulness as well. This is our future we're talking about here—beyond beautiful, definitely possible, even when doubt whispers—but this is also our current life we're considering leaving, a life we've become accustomed to. Our present life is all we have and all we know, before the thought of chasing "more" came into the picture. It's mournful.
Lastly, there's the 3 over 4 polyrhythm first presented by the vibraphone (which will always appear in the "PULSE" sections).
Two simultaneous rhythms.
Dream life vs. current life.
Kansas vs. Oz.
Superimposed rhythms represent this internal battle. And everything is pulsating. Nagging. Just like the decision that has to be made. The melodic quarter-note motif first heard in that vibraphone at "F" (the C-B-G), our "3", three-note melody happening over the "4" pulsing "quadruplets", is like a calling from our future self/life.The theme recurs hear throughout the work, always reminding us.
Yes. I now know the "ozurie" part of the piece.
But how do I make sense of it? How do I contine? Would it even work? How will it sound cohesive? What will be the structure? Would there be one?
And then: What do I call it?
Well, it's a reflection. A meditation. A sketch. A symphonic sketch. And then it hit me: "Sonder" and "Ozurie" are juxtaposed. Whereas "sonder" encourages us to look outside ourselves, "ozurie" is all about that internal battle.
Outward vs. inward.
External vs. internal.
Of course it all makes sense. I could juxtapose these two ideas in the piece—as juxtaposed as the words are to each other—alternating between these FIGURES aforementioned that represent the wild external realization of "Sonder" and these PULSES that represent the brewing, cathartic urgency and internal conflict of Ozurie. And though opposites, all the musical material contributes to this overall cathartic energy. It'd be impossible to keep them separate. Eventually, it'll all just blur together, with motifs once attributed to either word now crossing to and fro, to where the whole piece becomes this collective mass of juxtaposed ideas that shed light on one another.
So what do I call it?
Well, "Sonder & Ozurie" of course.
Because I can't see one without the other.
Because the music can't.
Because I want this piece to be a reflection on the two ideas, and the differences their insights bring can only be seen once brought together.
CLOSING STATEMENT
Koenig calls his book a dictionary of "sorrows", but it's not a book about sadness. He doesn't use the modern sense of the word:
"The word sadness originally meant 'fullness,' from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience...When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness these days is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be."
This is the overall mood I tried to capture with the piece. I'm always looking to create an experience with my music, I wanted this experience to have that same intensity that's "filled to the brim" as Koenig mentions. I wanted it to be full, to get to the original core of sorrow. I wanted this piece to represent the intensity and fullness of life and what it means to be human.
Only you can be the judge of whether I accomplished that or not, but I do hope you leave this work with something, even if it's just a slight change in perspective or awareness.
By the time I reached the end of this work, what was left was a piece that takes you on a cathartic, sonic odyssey, reflecting on the vast expanse of human emotion. And yes, even those moments that may make you feel "sad".
But as Koenig says,
"And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts—if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin."
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The Chicago Composers Orchestra presents music by living composers, extending the orchestral tradition to be open and vibrant, to speak to contemporary life and bring diverse people together.
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*denotes principal
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